Talk:Babylonian astronomy

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): MattBarnes22.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 15:10, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Needs attention

I created this article with a cut-and-paste from Hipparchus, which has gotten too large to be useful to a lot of readers. I did a little rearranging and polishing but it still needs a lot of work right now. I put a general tag on it because almost everything could benefit from attention. Some suggestions:

• Wikify or add a "see also" section
• Link other articles to this one
• Reorganize, or add new/more/better headings
• Rewrite any sentence or passage for clarity
• Check facts, identify useful sources
• Add external links to good material
• Suggest things that need to be added
• Add examples, explanation, or background
  • Explain who Hipparchus is (this came much earlier in the source article)
  • Explain who Ptolemy is
  • Explain what Babylonian astronomy was like
• Go to the Hipparchus article and improve the summary of Hipparchus and the Babylonians
• Go the Hipparchus article and improve anything else that needs attention.
• Write a companion article on Babylonian astronomy

Maestlin 18:56, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Jagged 85 Cleanup needed

The article currently presents some idiosyncratic interpretations of Babylonian astronomy. For example, it presents Babylonian astronomy as empirical, when most scholarship stresses its strongly theoretical basis and notes the rudimentary nature of its observational data. Similarly, it discusses the later geometric astronomies of the Mesopotamian region while ignoring the influence of Babylonian arithmetical astronomy in India and elsewhere. These reflect the influence of the work of Jagged 85, who made 95 of the 310 edits to this article and who was indefinitely blocked from Wikipedia on 7 September 2012. We should look carefully at the edits made by Jagged 85, to consider their accurate use of sources and their possible POV pushing.

In making these revisions, we should be guided by the recent scholarly understanding of Babylonian astronomy, which has undergone major changes in the last few decades. SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:09, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Grammar error?

I believe that the sentence "The fact that many star names appear in Sumerian bacon a continuity reaching into the Early Bronze Age." has a typographical error in it - should the word "bacon" be "beckon"? If, on the other hand, Sumerian bacon is some special kind of writing then there should be a wiki link to a discussion of that writing, and the word "shows" should be inserted after the word bacon. Wikiphunt (talk) 14:48, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

The word was 'suggests' until some missed vandalism from an editor I am about to block from editing. Well spotted. Ah, fixed it also. Dougweller (talk) 15:21, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Old Babylonian astronomy FLAW

The section Old Babylonian astronomy suffers from the following serious flaw. It alleges that Old Babylonian astronomy was practiced during the First Babylonian Dynasty, which was from 1830 BC to 1531 BC. The star catalogues referred to were:

• Enuma Anu Enlil, dated to the Kassite period 1531-1155 BC,
• MUL.APIN, dated to post-Kassite, i.e. later than 1100 BC, and prob. far into the Iron Age.

If there was an Old Babylonian astronomy, which doesn't seem too far fetched, it must be based on other arguments. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 20:29, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I misread it. I missed the "after" in the first sentence. Nevertheless: astronomy during the first dynasty should preferrably be attested. The known primary sources that reliably can be connected to astronomy are from the Kassite period, which is after the first dynasty. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 20:36, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Evidence

Unless evidence is provided to show that Babylonian astronomy influenced Indian astronomy in any way, I am removing the small piece of text from the article.86.185.203.15 (talk) 22:54, 26 February 2010 (UTC)IA

Testimony of Isaac Newton is HIGHLY pertinent to Babylonian astronomy

"The Chaldeans long ago believed that the planets revolve in nearly concentric orbits around the sun and that the comets do so in extremely eccentric orbits, and the Pythagoreans introduced this philosophy into Greece. But it was also known to the ancients that the moon is heavy toward the earth, and that the stars are heavy toward one another, and that all bodies in a vacuum fall to the earth with equal velocity and thus are heavy in proportion to the quantity of matter in each of them. Because of lack of demonstrations, this philosophy fell into disuse, and I did not invent it but have only tried to use the force of demonstrations to revive it." – Isaac Newton

If the entire text can't be added, perhaps a smaller reference to it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.179.163.77 (talk) 06:21, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Mesopotamian astronomy

Suggest create the article about Mesopotamian astronomy, including Sumerian astronomy.--Lagoset (talk) 10:27, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Google NGram Viewer indicates that "Babylonian astronomy" has been most commonly discussed. The more general term, "Mesopotamian astronomy", while becoming more common, still represernts only about 10% of the usage. SteveMcCluskey (talk) 14:49, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Improperly sourced edits

@MattBarnes22: Some of your recent edits still contain untraceable citations to a university login page. Please review your edits for appropriate citations. Thanks, --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:33, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Mulapin.jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:38, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Since there was a cc-by-sa-4.0 version of the image, and at higher resolution, I replaced the possible copyvio. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 18:45, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Loaded and Inaccurate Statement

Someone keeps putting "all" of Western science comes from "late Babylonian Astronomy". That statement is not accurate, since our Western system obviously originates with classical Greece, no one debates that, and I suppose that this comment posits that the first great Greek mathematicians got their knowledge solely originating from the Babylonians. NOT TRUE AT ALL. Euclid lived and studied the dynastic Egyptian texts when he lived in ALEXANDRIA, and the first great Greek thinkers such as Solon, etc.., are known to have gotten MOST OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE from the Egyptian high priests, mainly at Sais during that time, much of it handed down from the Old Kingdom (the height of pyramid building and architecture), far earlier than Babylonia even existed (it was Sumer). This includes the technical sciences as well. Egypt was very much closed off and did not share or gain knowledge from the Babylonians or anyone else, and attained it virtually all themselves. The only example one needs for the supremacy in Egyptian science and astronomy (although there are countless others), is the Great Pyramid itself, built in 2560 BC, way before Babylonian astronomy and civilization, which is aligned to true North within four minutes of arc, and is squared to within 12 seconds of arc, for a megastructure 755 ft. long and 480 ft. high (there are 3,600 seconds of arc in a circle)! That paragraph and comment is loaded and not accurate the way in which it is laid out, and Egyptian astronomy and science should at least be acknowledged with some type of caveat along with Babylonian astronomy, if this article is going to reference the entire scope of Western science and It's specific origins. --JLavigne508 (talk) 12:16, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this up on talk. The reason I recently reverted your edit, which had changed all to most, is that the word "all" appears explicitly in the passage from Asger Aaboe's essay which had been cited as source for that passage. If you have sources for the role of Egyptian astronomy, feel free to enter them. At the moment you are providing vague claims that modern astronomy traces its origin to Egypt, but with no evidence to support them. People (like Aaboe and Neugebauer) who have studied the history of ancient mathematical astronomy have presented abundant evidence for the centrality of Babylonian astronomy in Greek and later astronomies. Interestingly, Neugebauer, who has co-edited a collection of Egyptian Astronomical Texts, introduced a brief discussion of Egyptian astronomy (pp. 559-572) in his 3 volume History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy with the comment that:

Egypt has no place in a work on the history of mathematical astronomy. Nevertheless I devote a separate "Book" on this subject in order to draw the reader's attention to its insignificance which cannot be too strongly emphasized in comparison with the Babylonian and the Greek contributions to the development of scientific astronomy.

If you can find reliable sources refuting the scholarly consensus on the importance of Babylonian astronomy, feel free to cite them in the article. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 15:03, 12 September 2020 (UTC)